OUR WORK

Understanding Complex Channel Interactions and Marketing Impact

CHALLENGE

With a substantial investment in online media, our client — a high-end kitchen appliance manufacturer — employs various tactics to move consumers through the purchase funnel, from awareness to consideration to intent.

While driving qualified leads is a critical goal of media campaigns, the two-tiered distribution model makes it difficult to track a user accurately through a sale. As a result, demonstrating the value of marketing activities, particularly those at the upper funnel, and their impact on sales poses a challenge.

INSIGHT

Our client and its media partners faced data gaps and difficulties in accurately attributing sales back to marketing efforts.

While the focus had traditionally been on driving website traffic and generating appointment bookings, visibility along the path to purchase often diminished thereafter. Collaborating with the media team to understand the client’s highest priority questions about media performance, we identified an approach that blended elements of both bottom-up and top-down methodologies. This approach aimed to provide rapid answers to questions about the impact of different media channels and their interactions with each other.

APPROACH

Traditionally, tools that marry technology and analytics, such as multitouch attribution, are used to document customer journeys. However, such customer-level analytical approaches require a substantial investment in technology infrastructure.

Furthermore, for businesses like our client’s, customer journeys are substantially longer. Consideration for these nuances in customer paths to purchase must be accounted for when evaluating the marketing impact on leads or sales.

We decided to use a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model, coined Funnel Geometry, which uses aggregate-level time-series data to analyze the dynamic relationship between variables over time.

This method enables a quick breakdown of the relationship between various media investment tactics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
The model effectively complemented our client’s multichannel marketing strategies, considering mixed channels and campaign combinations, as well as the KPIs defined for different stages of the website’s conversion funnel.
By measuring the impact of adjusting impression volume per media tactic on website traffic, brochure requests, and showroom appointments, the model provided insights into the media strategies that had the most significant impact on KPIs.

IMPACT

To provide actionable recommendations, effective collaboration between our team and the media planners was crucial.

This collaboration involved comprehensive discussions that incorporated insights from the business, media, and analytic perspectives. By reframing the model’s output into strategic and realistic media recommendations, we ensured that its findings aligned with the media planners’ goals.

The results derived from the Funnel Geometry model:

Reinforced the importance of awareness, consideration, and intent media objectives as interconnected elements
Highlighted the most impactful media tactics for achieving the objectives
Provided quantitative evidence that justified greater investments in awareness campaigns